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subject was. You wouldn’t need to look for it.’
    ‘You only say this because I’m a girl,’ said Caris presently. Her brows were furrowed above her glittering brown eyes.I saw that I had offended her. ‘If I was a man you wouldn’t say it – you’d be egging me on, giving me money and grants and trumpeting the fact that you’d discovered me. Whereas in fact what you want to do is crush me, isn’t it?’
    She looked at me with her delicate face. I had to concede that there was some truth in what she had said.
    ‘Why do you want to crush me?’ she asked, wonderingly, with a little smile.
    ‘I want you to stay as you are,’ I said. ‘As you are right now.’
    ‘Do you know where we’re standing?’ she said.
    I looked around me. We had wandered away a little from the party. We were in a place of foliage and moonlight where things snapped beneath our feet. The big, black presences of trees were around us.
    ‘We’re in a ring of oaks,’ she said. ‘It’s magic here, you know.’
    I bent forward and kissed her. The distant commotion of the party was in my ears. Some seconds passed. Kissing Caris was like kissing a child. She was warm and sweet and she gave the impression of being entirely indifferent to what I was doing. She did not look as she had looked when Jasper the artist kissed her. I decided I would have to marry her. I would marry her and live with her at Egypt, along with all her family and perhaps even Jasper himself.
    ‘Happy birthday,’ I said again, stupidly.
    Everyone was dancing on the lawn. The music and the shouting echoed down the hill in long chimes into the valley. I saw Paul Hanbury dancing with a very tall young woman, who swayed before him like a stalk of wheat while he scurried around her, crab-like, casting her salacious looks. When he saw me he grasped my hand and we all danced around together, me, him and the swaying girl. I couldn’t see Adam anywhere. I saw Vivian, standing by the drinks table with her arms crossed awkwardly over her stomach, talking to an elderly lady. Numerous children were dancing amongst theadults. Sometimes they danced with each other. More often their mothers danced with them, kind and weary-faced, stooped over. I noticed a fair-haired boy of eleven or so standing beside Vivian, gulping unnoticed from the wineglasses on the table. After each gulp he would look around him with a startled expression on his face. I guessed he was Adam’s brother Brendon, the boy I had seen in the chicken house.
    When I turned back to the dancing, Audrey had manifested herself in front of me. She stood in her tight-fitting blue costume and high heels, one arm flung into the air and a bare leg planted dramatically out in front of her. She presented herself to me, glaring at me with the fiery, warlike countenance of an exotic bird embarking on its mating ritual. I saw that she was extremely drunk: she was incandescent; she was on fire. She began to dance around me in a strutting fashion, pausing occasionally to assume her dramatic pose, eyes blazing, arm aloft, as though offering me a challenge. Round and round me she went: I shadowed her uncertainly. In her exertion her face had grown warm beneath its make-up; the different colours shimmered greasily as though they had come alive, as though she were a living image of herself. Audrey clapped her hands on my shoulders. As she circled me she moved her hands over my shirt and said something with her painted mouth that I didn’t hear over the music. She bared her even, slightly yellowed teeth in a smile. A feeling of apprehension stirred in my stomach. She gave me an impatient look.
    ‘Do you like me?’ she said hotly into my ear, before circling me once more.
    I smiled urbanely, or so I thought, and did not reply.
    ‘You can have me, darling,’ she said, into my ear. ‘You can take me now.’
    ‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea, Mrs Hanbury,’ I said quaveringly.
    ‘I need somebody to fuck me,’ she